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CutMap is a full-featured SketchUp extension for woodworkers and builders.

Video of Introduction

Video of Printing Labels

CutMap

CutMap is a full-featured SketchUp extension for woodworkers and builders. The extension creates in-model cutting diagrams (cutlists) from a SketchUp models. In-model cutlists leverage the power of SketchUp to view, examine, and modify cutlists.

CutMap for SketchUp 2017 is now available. For now, please download the compatible version of CutMap from the labyrinthware website here. We will submit the new build to the SketchUp warehouse, but it usually takes about a week for approval.

Note that in the introduction video the model is already painted. It doesn't show the painting of the model, but this is a necessary step. The components or groups in your model must be painted with materials that match the sheet goods defined in the extension.

This is a free-of-charge beta version. It's designed to stop functioning at some point once the first version is released. The plan is to release a free version with genuinely useful, but limited, functionality. Additional features will be made available at reasonable price points.

We appreciate your support and feedback. Thanks!

Reviews

Just wanted to post this incase anyone else runs into the same issue as I did. I am on a mac and using the 2017 version. I installed the current version from this website (0.4.4 Feb 2016) and it gives an error after you restart SketchUp. I went to the authors site http://labyrinthware.com/ and downloaded the new 2017 version (0.4.5) and tried to update it manually through the extension manager. SketchUp didn't give me any feedback that it actually updated anything. I assumed it did but it was still throwing the same error on restart. I had to go back to the extension manager and uninstall the first version and then manually install the new version and finally everything worked.

Upate: I was incorrect in stating this extension as non-functional. I was not using the extension correctly. I've determined through re-watching Brenton's instructional videos on YouTube (allows for a larger screen than does the extension warehouse) I found a step in the CutMap process I was missing. I'm excited to continue using this extension and getting more familiar with it's functions.

I still contend that audible commentary would be more helpful in the future.

I appreciate the author's, Brenton's, timely response to my post and his willingness to assist me in determining the cause of my issue. I shouldn't have been so hasty in my conclusions.

Thumbs up, Brenton.

Original Post:
This extension has possibilities however it's non-functional. I installed the 2017 compatible version from the website listed. I've watched the videos to no avail - which by the way, audible commentary would be useful when creating an instructional video, but that's just me. Too bad really, I was so looking forward to using this extension. Until the author completes his creation - we're left to wonder.....

I'm the author. Sorry it's not functional for you. Please let me know what problems you are having and I'll do whatever I can to get it working on your setup. You can contact me directly at labyrinthware@gmail.com. If the problems and solutions are things others can benefit from I'll post that publicly later.

Brenton,
I/m a longtime user of your extension and I have become very dependent on features with every project that I do. I hope your port to 2017 version goes without a hitch. 2016 Make is no longer supported so I am without option.
Thanks in advance for your efforts! Bill

Hello Brenton,
Cutmap is a great tool. I've used for a long time. I would like to use it for Sketchup 2017, but it needs an update. I hope you have an update scheduled so i can continue using it. You're doing a wonderful job. Thank you.
Best regards.
E.G.

There will be a CutMap update to support SU 2017. Please continue to use SU 2016 with CutMap until the update is ready. It shouldn't be difficult to fix CutMap for the new SU version as there are always small glitches whenever a major SU update is released. I wasn't provided with a beta of SU 2017 (need to look into that!) so I wasn't able to have a new version of CutMap ready before the release.

this is really a nice plugin. I love the feature, that lets you set your own timber with its dimension (something that other plugins lack). And the cutmap really works (after some fiddling with materials :) ).

But I get problem printing labels. I have a project with more than 500 components (each of them has its name, sometimes a bit longer, so I can keep track) and when I try to make a labels, the Chrome tells me, that the URL is too long for this server.

I'm affraid, that there are surely other people with rather large projects, who will run into this bug as well. Is there any chance of repair?

Yes, it could be a problem with the URL getting too long if you have many components. The limit is pretty high and I've never hit it myself.

The new version of CutMap should cut down on the URL length because duplicates are not included in the URL. In the current version if you had, say, six "side" pieces each would be specified in the URL six times. In the not yet released new version the "side" piece would be specified in the URL just one time with a notation that there are six of them, so the label printer knows to make six. This conservation of URL length is also used for "copies."

I'm curious if you think this would help in your case. Are all 500 components in you model unique, or do you have many duplicated parts?

and thanks for answer. No, my components are not all unique, in fact there is like 20 or 25 unique compontents. So the new version would help with this.

But let me ask a different question. Is there any chance of printing the cut layout? Well, you see, labels are one thing, but it is not so convenient to have my laptop open near my table saw. A printed paper would be much better. With 500+ components, one is clearly not able to remember the cut layout by heart.

Hi, is working good with me, the olny thing is about the price in the excel file. I add the price but it don't show in the file. Everything else is good. Some crash when you undo the cutlist and try to do it again..

Please download CutMap from http://labyrinthware.com. The latest version there should be 2016 compatible. Please let me know if you have any problems. The CutMap version here is very out-of-date. I'm planning on submitting the current rev to the warehouse, but it can take a long time before it goes live.

What problem are you experiencing? I just tried it myself (Mac, Make 2016) from the website and from the warehouse and both seemed to work fine for me. The only thing I can think of is that If you are upgrading from an older version of CutMap you have to restart SketchUp before you will see the new version.

Thank you. The version on your website worked. Also the blurb that says "However, after installing the new version you must exit and restart SketchUp to use the updated version. Until you restart SketchUp you will still be running the old version of CutMap." is SUPER helpful.

Lastly, I couldn't find a way to change the font size for the labels embedded in the generated cutlist entities. Is there a way to update this? On small cuts of wood they're very difficult to read.

There is a major update to CutMap that is forthcoming that has the ability to change the font size on the screen labels. The new version has many other new features and usability enhancements. I don't have an ETA on it yet, but hopefully it'll be ready in a month or two.

Thanks for the kind words. The next release has been delayed a bit -- feature creep is to blame. We've added internationalization and an alternative cutlist generator engine which should be a lot faster.

I hope to post a preview on labyrinthware.com soon, mostly to show the language translations which should be pretty amusing to people who are bilingual as the translations are automatic via Google Translate. Hopefully some people will volunteer to help provide human translations. The translations don't have to be perfect before release, but the code has to be in place.

Hello Brenton Olander,
I'm glad to see your progress, the features seem exciting. No worries about the delay. The international language feature is interesting as I have experience translating english/spanish - and I am human, and imperfect. (Raising my hand to volunteer as I write this, very difficult)

I really appreciate the help with the translations! Please send an email to labyrinthware@gmail.com. If anyone else reading this want to volunteer please send an email as well. I'm planning on supporting the languages that SketchUp supports which are Spanish, German, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese Simplified, and Chinese Traditional.

The way it works is that I have a process that extracts all the text in the program, writing them out to a file, I then upload the file to the Google Translate Toolkit web site. I can then download the machine translations for a particular language and then merge that with a localized version of the plug-in. What's nice, is that the Google website also allows anyone with a browser to view the english text snippets and override the machine translations using a pretty easy to use web page interface.

I can get an idea of the quality of a machine translation by translating the translation back to english. Many of the machine translations aren't too bad, but some can be very funny such as "Saw Kerf" becoming "I saw a calf". :)

Why the "Copies" field in "Go page" tab, duplicate the amount of boards every time you increment "Copies" in 1??. For the planter example (6 boards), if you select "Copies=3", you should obtain 3*6=18 boards, but instead, you obtain 24 boards. Then, for "Copies= 4", instead of 4*6=24 boards, CutMap gives you 48 boards (double of 24), and so on, and so on...

Thanks for reporting the "copies" bug. I'll include the fix for the bug in the next update release.

Currently there is no way to change the text on boards in the SketchUp cutlist (you can on the printed labels). In the next major version of CutMap there will be enhancements in this area. The cutlist scene will have some interactive elements and it will be possible to hide the labels and change the font size. Any feedback you have is appreciated.

I didn't receive your email. The address looks correct so I don't know what happened. Please try again if you have any questions or feedback.

With such a simple interface this should be easy to use but what I thought would work doesn't. I have followed all the help videos and after about 2 hours I still can't get it working properly. I will stick with it for a bit more but the video tutorials do not go deep enough to make this easy to use.

I replied to this question from Terry on my YouTube channel, but I thought I should reply here as well because I know other people are experiencing the same problem. The solution usually is that you need to color your model with materials that match materials assigned to your sheets goods. The Intro tutorial video doesn't show this important step so it is confusing. I plan on changing the video as soon as I can.

You'll get The "empty" message when CutMap can't find any components or groups in the scene specified in the "Auto select scene..." on the CutMap "Go" page. You may want to make sure that that field contains what you want.

If you are still having problems please email me your SketchUp file to the support email address: labyrinthware@gmail.com

Thanks for the report. I think that is the bug fixed in v0.3.4. Please see the comments in the CutMap Extension Warehouse listing. I submitted the updated version to SketchUp last week, but it's still not up on the site. You can download the fixed version at labyrinthware.com, however. Please give it a try.

I loaded your shelves.skp file, and after making a few changes, it worked fine for me. I made the size of the shelf smaller so it would fit into one of the standard sheet sizes provided in CutMap and also changed the shelf material to the default for the "Plywood". I've attached shelves2.skp with the cutlist.

Defining your own sheets sizes with custom materials is a feature of CutMap, but unfortunately they don't travel with the SketchUp doc file (they stay on your local computer), so for debugging I thought I'd change it to universal CutMap sizes and materials.

As an aside, in a future update to CutMap I think I will save the sizes and details of the sheets actually used in a cutlist to the skp file. That way custom sheet definitions will show up in CutMap when the files are opened on other machines.

Anyway, I don't think we've solved the problem you are experiencing, especially since the tutorial files are also not working for you.

A couple of questions: Are you getting a warning message when you try to create a cutlist? Are you selecting an appropriate sheet from the "Project Sheets" box in the CutMap "Go" tab?

One thing you can do to get diagnostics is to open the Ruby Console (Window->Ruby Console menu item) while running CutMap. If you could try this and then send me the output from the console that might help me out a lot.

I appreciate your help to investigate the issue. This is the first beta release of the extension so glitches are not too surprising, but I do want to solve these!

First of all congratulations for your great plugin!
Unfortunately it doesn’t work on my iMac as well on my Windows PC. See attached file where I tried to generate a Cutlist from a simple model.
Although it generates the scene "Cutlist" but on this page there is nothing to see? Is it possible that there is a bug in the program?
I've done everything according to the tutorials but maybe I'm doing something wrong?